Regarding the archaic syntax in my perl programs, I'm 80 years old, and've been programming since 1965, so if we were conversing you'd probably hear some stuff like "Awesome," "Beet Feet" and "Bug out" from me.

Sure, I understand, and a few of the edits I made are indeed purely stylistic (for is equivalent to foreach, dropping the parens on function calls, or running the code through perltidy), but at least the changes I named in my node above have become best practices for good reason, as explained in the links. And Use strict and warnings is quite important - your question is a good example of that and the potential of symbolic references to cause confusion and hard to diagnose bugs.